Gone are the days of sleazy, pushy salespeople who just wanted to make a quick buck. In 2023, sales is all about building relationships, being authentic, and providing value.
The art of sales for fitness businesses has undergone significant changes in the last few years. Technological advancements, evolving consumer demand, the advent of online marketplaces and social media platforms (and many more factors) have completely changed the landscape for gyms in the 2020s.
Building relationships
In terms of sales strategies, fitness businesses are now more focused on building long-term relationships with their customers. This includes providing personalized experiences, offering value-added services, and emphasizing the importance of community building. Many fitness businesses have also shifted their sales approach towards a more consultative approach, where they focus on educating customers and helping them achieve their fitness goals.
Thanks to the rise of technology and the internet, customers are more informed than ever before. They can research products, read reviews, and compare prices with just a few clicks. Prospects want to feel like you’re speaking directly to them, not just sending out a generic sales pitch to everyone on your email list. We need to personalise the experience, add value upfront, and tailor our approach to the person standing in front of us.
While technology has undoubtedly played a significant role in changing the sales landscape for fitness businesses, in-person interaction remains crucial. While online sales and virtual training have become more popular, customers still value the personal touch and support they get from interacting with trainers and fitness professionals in person. We need to strike a balance between digital and in-person interactions to provide a well-rounded and personalised experience for our customers.
We need to give them a version of sales that makes sense to them – and that has integrity and professionalism at its heart.
Here’s how:
- We offer something of value to the prospect, no strings attached. This can be anything from a blog post to the 30-day trial itself.
- We build trust, authority, and spread the word about our existence.
- We build TOMA – top of mind awareness – that makes us the go-to establishment for them or anyone they know when they decide they want to get in shape.
- We create a community based on sound, easily digestible knowledge.
- With every piece of value we add, we make a deposit in our sales ‘bank account’ by giving value upfront to the client without asking for anything in return. When we eventually offer a sale, we make a withdrawal from what we’ve saved.
Adding value like this, putting the customer experience at the heart of everything we do, is a crucial sales approach for modern service-based businesses.
It also allows you to align what you do with your core values and your own personal vision for success. The power of doing business ethically can’t be underestimated, and will make getting up to go to work every morning a whole lot easier.
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Everything (and everyone) is sales
Sales is everything. The appearance of the gym from the outside; the thread count of the towels; the font on your website; the smile on your coaches’ faces when a client walks in; the mood in the gym; the skill of your head salesperson/assessor. We are constantly selling the value of our service to the client, both prospect and current.
This means that we can’t separate responsibility for sales into one or two individuals in the gym. Every single person, from the front of house person to your coach intern, needs to understand the importance of selling – and how to do it.
So even though you’ll have one or two people who’ll bear the brunt of the direct sales work (closing sales and fielding concerns and enquiries from leads), you need to invest in sales training for everybody. Taking your time to develop the right skills in your team will pay off a hundred times when push comes to shove.
The news rules for sales
Sales isn’t some esoteric art that requires initiation into the cult of the used-car salesman to be effective.
But there are some rules to follow if you want to turn prospects into clients, and keep them that way. Almost all of them require you to see the situation from the buyer’s perspective, and then use this to communicate more effectively.
1. Remember it’s not about you
Here’s an example: you’ve just opened your new gym – your baby – and give your first prospects their tour. You tell them about the great equipment you have, the size of your free-weights area, the composite properties of the matting you’ve put down.
Stop. Your prospect doesn’t care about this stuff.
You need to make their experience of the gym about them. What are their goals? How can the gym help them get what they want? Keep bringing yourself back to their point of view. This attitude of “what’s in it for them” and focusing on benefits over just features should run through all your communications.
2. Reduce the risk
Thanks to the old-school fitness model which doesn’t value the member past their initial sign-up, people are extremely wary of committing to a contract. In sales, we need to lower the barrier of entry and make this risk less intimidating.
Tools like the thirty-day trial or 21-day challenge are a crucial part of this, but so is the way you communicate. The way you speak, how you present the gym, the copy in your ads; everything is about communicating that you’re not out to trap the prospect in membership hell. They’re in control here.
3. Make a connection
The prospect of joining a gym can be deeply anxiety-provoking for many individuals, especially those who are out of shape. Your job is to get them to a place where they feel proud for wanting to make a positive change, and confident that they’re doing the right thing.
This means relatable staff who are close to the target demographic – a 40 year old mother of three will find it hard to relate to a super-lean 19 year old who doesn’t even know that “baby weight” is a thing. It also means individualizing the sales process so it’s relevant to each person. Don’t assume that women want to lose weight, not get strong; or vice versa for men. Tailor your approach to their goals, not your ideas.
The heart of sales is a true understanding of your customer, and a selling process that’s tailored to them.
Looking for the next step in marketing your training gym?
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